Thrombone leaped up and so did Addy and the girls. They all danced and laughed happily. No one else seemed to feel that the world was falling apart. No one else seemed afraid of what might happen in the days to come.
I fed the fire while my friends and Juan Thrombone danced. Reggie beat his drum with an amazing ear for someone untrained. They were all wild and abandoned, but Alacrity was by far the most primal. Her movements were like nothing except maybe the flames I fed. She leaped and gesticulated, bounced and sang out. Her whiteness was fearful to see. Her intensity, I feared, was the future of the world.
The dancing went on for quite a while longer. Finally Addy tired, and Juan followed her back to the fire. Smiling and happy, they sat there next to me. I felt more lonely than ever.
“The trees are not only a wall of wood and root,” Juan was saying later on, after much honey wine, “but they sing a dull song I taught them. That song hides the puppy trees and you and me. They also call for people like you, First Light” — he was referring to Addy, he was holding her hand — “humans half dipped blue. I wanted them to come help me tend the trees and the forest.”
“Why would the trees need tending?” I asked. “It is a forest, isn’t it? The trees can get along on their own.”
“But these are special trees,” the little woodsman replied.
“What kind of special trees?”
Juan Thrombone turned his full attention upon me then. In his eyes I saw a vastness across which, I imagined, a strong wind blew. His smile didn’t seem relevant to the power in those eyes, but he smiled anyway and said, “There are two kinds of trees that are special. One because they can sing and the other because they roar.”
“What do you mean?”
“You heard a call, did you not?” he asked.
The storm in his gaze seemed to grow in power.
“That call,” he continued, “was from a thousand trees whose parents were white firs. I grafted them so they could sing so sweet and high. They sing like the wind, only higher. They sing like the sun before dawn.”
“The wind and the sun,” Addy said. “Are those the two kinds?”
“No, First Light,” Juan said gently. “The white firs sing of the sun and wind. And then there are the puppy trees.”
“What are they?” I asked.
“Deep bass ramblers. Children of what you call blue light but, like Alacrity, born here. They are orphans and I tend them. They rumble like bullfrogs and tickle Earth’s soul.”
“And we’re here to tend them?” I asked.
“No,” he said. The tone of his voice would have knocked me down if I wasn’t already seated. “The puppy trees, the deep ramblers, might mistake you for dinner and suck the life from your bones. Stay away from them. You were summoned here to tend the special white firs, the high singers, the maskers of blue. The ones that called you. They called and you came.”
“We did,” I said. “But you didn’t want the children. You wanted Addy, but you wanted her to leave Alacrity behind.”
I wanted Addy to see him for what he was.
“I never expected that those of such power, even so young, would follow those so weak. I didn’t know if I could protect them and the puppy trees too. The thing out there, the one you call Gray Man. He wants only to kill. I thought that all of us together here would make too much noise, would bring him here.”
“And so he could be on the way here right now?” I said, happy that I now had a way to get my friends to leave.
“He might be. He might.” Juan cocked his ear upward. “But I don’t hear him coming. No, I don’t.”
“But he could be coming,” I said. “He could be, and you just don’t hear it yet. He could come on us in our sleep up here. He could kill us in our sleep. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here now.”
I looked around at my companions and friends. The children had stopped their dancing to listen. They were all looking to Juan Thrombone. It was he who they turned to for answers now. It was he whom they trusted.
“You can leave if you want to,” Juan said to me. “You are welcome if you care to stay. The Gray Man may not know where we are; he may have changed also. This could well be true.”
“I’m staying,” Reggie said. “It’s nice here. It’s the safest place in the whole world.”
“Me too,” Wanita said.
“Please stay, Chance,” Alacrity whined. “Please stay with us here. Please.”
I looked at Addy. Her fingers were laced with Juan Thrombone’s. She held my eyes a moment and then looked away.
“I’m staying for a while at least, Chance. I’m tired and sick still. And I can’t think of anywhere else to go.”
“And there will be others,” Juan said. “More people will come to us over the weeks and days. The song you heard goes like a ribbon on the wind, blowing here and there. Some will hear it. A few will come. And when they get here, there’s an old town down by the stream. It’s a ghost town now, but soon they will come and we can be happy, Last Chance, for a while more.”
Addy snuggled down and put her head against Juan’s shoulder. That’s what broke my will. He had taken everything that I had left with his funny way of talking and his eyes like forever.
“Okay,” I said. “All right, I’ll stay for a few days more. At least until Addy is better. Then we can talk about it again.”
And with that, something eased in me. A pressure, a weight. I gave in to the spell of Juan Thrombone and his magical wood. Reggie began playing his drum again and we all danced. Somewhere in the early hours of the morning Juan and Addy disappeared. I found them the next day naked and wrapped in each other’s arms under the hanging shingles of Number One. They were together from that day on.
Twenty-five
AT FIRST I STAYED because of the children. But within the first month I knew that they were safe with Addy and her man. After that I just didn’t know where to go. Juan offered to walk me out of the wood if I wanted to leave. But the truth was, I wanted him to leave. Sometimes he’d go away for days at a time. I’d begin to hope that he’d hurt himself or maybe just decided to go elsewhere. I’d try to comfort Addy at those times, telling her that she didn’t have to worry.
I wanted Addy then. It had never crossed my mind before. She was Ordé’s woman to begin with, and later, while we fled the threat of Gray Man, I was too worried even to think about love. But once we were settled in Treaty, I wanted her to choose me over Juan. I wanted her to see that he was unstable but that I was constant.
But she never worried when Juan was gone.
“He’ll be back, Chance,” she’d say with a dreamy look on her face. “He’ll come back to me and he’ll have great stories to tell.”
Not only had her wound healed but her skin had softened, the little red veins in her eyes had cleared. She started singing songs and working with strange leaves, tree needles actually, and barks that Juan brought for her to cook in a huge stone tub that appeared one day next to Number Nine.
“My friends brought it in the night,” he told me when I asked how the big hollow rock got there.
Juan taught Addy how to cook the leaves and wood and how to pound the mixture with a pestle the size of a baseball bat. She worked at it for days until the resulting green paste was thick. Then she spread out the mixture on a big stone that lay in the field separating the cathedral of Treaty from the surrounding woods. The paste dried into an extremely thin and seemingly delicate blue-green material. It was like rice paper, only it wouldn’t tear or decompose. From this cloth Addy made our clothes. She didn’t sew the seams but used wooden buttons with bearhair ties that Juan collected for her.
“There’s what you call blue light in those leafies,” Thrombone said to me when I marveled at the fabric Addy made. “I harvest them from the puppy trees when they’re rumbling content. They have power in them plenty.”
He also made tea from those leaves. He would let them steep over a low flame in a stone pot for weeks at a time
. Then he’d pour the liquid into one of his few precious glass bottles and let it cool in a stream. The brew was strong-tasting, sweet and pungent. Whenever I drank that tea I felt a momentary elation followed by an hour of unutterable calm.
One day I awoke to deep drumbeats playing somewhere out in the woods. I remembered something and went looking for Alacrity. She and I were going to look for straight branches from which she could make arrows for the bow Juan and Reggie had made. I couldn’t find her, so I went to Addy, who was naked next to Number One, making pants for either Reggie or me.
“She left with Juan this morning,” Addy said.
“When are they coming back?”
“Not for a few days.”
“A few days? You let your daughter go off into the woods with a man like that overnight? What’s wrong with you, Addy?”
“It’s okay, Chance. He’s going to help her. You know how restless she’s been. He found her hacking away at tree bark, and Reggie had to stop her from tormenting Wanita. Juan said that he’s going to take her on a walk to discover her true nature.”
“How could you just let her go like that?”
Addy looked up at me, putting down her work. Like I said, she was naked. She was a very beautiful woman, and I was especially aware of that when she peered into my eyes.
“Sit down, Chance,” she said.
I did so.
“You have to stop this now. You have to accept Juan and his life out here. I know that you love us and that you want to protect us, but fighting him isn’t going to help. This is his home and we’re his guests. I don’t know what he’s doing with Julia out there, but whatever it is, I know it’s for the best.” Her green eyes held on to the light like dusky quartz.
“But how can you say that?” I said. “You don’t know him. You just met him. He can get in your head. Maybe he’s hypnotized you.”
The way she shook her head crushed any hope I had left.
She brought her hands to either side of my head and kissed me, softly at first.
I wanted to give her the best loving that she had ever had. I wanted to make her sing out my name and forget all about Juan Thrombone. But I hadn’t made love to a woman in many months, so it was the most I could do to call out her name once before I came.
She gave out a loud oh and then wrapped her arms and legs around me, to comfort my distress. She cooed in my ear, “It’s all right, Chance. It’s okay.”
I sat up and away from her.
“What’s your boyfriend gonna think about that, huh?” I asked.
“Juan doesn’t love me for that,” she said. “He’d know that I was just sharing the love around us with one of our friends.”
“Like he’s doing right now with your little girl?”
Addy rose and walked away. I made to go after her, but instead I went another way, the direction from which the drumming was coming.
I followed the deep vibrations until I came upon Reggie, who now called himself Pathfinder, and Wanita in a small hollow. He was beating his big log with hardened hands while Wanita lay down before him absorbing the music with her bones.
“Reggie.”
“Yeah, Chance?” he answered, still rolling the rhythm out from his drum.
“I need you to help me find Alacrity. There’s something wrong, and I need to go find her.”
“What’s wrong? Somethin’ wrong with you, Chance?” the boy who had become a man asked.
“No, with Alacrity. She’s disappeared and I want to find her.”
“She’s wit’ Bones,” Wanita said. Bones is what she called Juan Thrombone.
“But I’ve got to find her.”
“She’ll come back, Chance,” Reggie said. “We don’t have to go looking for her if she’s comin’ back.”
“But I need to find her,” I said again.
“For what?”
“All you need to do is help me and not ask all these stupid questions.” I was mad and hoping that my anger could still overwhelm the child that lingered in the man.
“I’m stayin’ here,” Reggie said. “I’ma play drums out here and that’s all.”
I left them in the clearing and went out to find Alacrity and Thrombone myself. I wandered in the woods around Treaty and then I went farther away. I started calling for her after midday. That evening, when my voice finally gave out, I returned to camp. Reggie and Wanita were already asleep. Addy was sitting by a fire under Number One, but I didn’t feel like talking to her.
The next morning I went out again. For the next six mornings I searched and called. But I couldn’t find her.
In among the regular trees (firs, incense cedars, yellow pine, even a hemlock here and there) were the special white firs of Juan Thrombone. These trees had a different kind of life to them. They were trees like any others in most ways, but they also gave off a low-level emission — a sound that you couldn’t quite hear, a song. And though I had never actually seen one move, I was often disoriented by parts of the woods that were sometimes crowded by white firs but at other times were sparse or even bare.
During that week I am sure that the firs conspired to stymie my attempts to find Alacrity. Sometimes, when I thought I heard a child’s strained voice, I’d rush to get there, but the firs were too dense and I couldn’t make it through. Sometimes the path I followed went in circles leading me away from my destination.
Addy refused to talk to me about it. Reggie thought I was crazy, and Wanita kept telling me stories about dreams she’d had. I think she hoped I would forget about Alacrity while listening to her tales.
I was young and stupid then. I don’t remember most of the dreams. I was too worried about Alacrity, or more accurately, I was jealous. Alacrity treated me like her father and her best friend. I knew that Juan wasn’t abusing her. But he was taking her from me. Just like he’d taken Addy.
The one dream of Wanita’s that I remember was about the Tusk Men. Big men with hairy bodies and lower jaws that jutted out sporting long saberlike teeth. They carried clubs and wandered up and down the streets of a bombed-out city. They were meat-eaters. They ate people. People, Wanita said. Whatever place her dreams took her that time, there were people there, not pink crystals or rolling sentient fogs.
The Tusk Men knew that Wanita was there. They looked for her but she ran. She ran across the sky to a big stone fort where people gathered to fight off their enemies. These enemies were Tusk Men and wolf women, crawling worm people and fat bottoms who weighed almost nothing, floating on poisonous gases like flatulent balloons.
The dream had frightened Wanita, that’s why I remember it. I put her on my lap and hugged her and told her that all of that was far away and she was safe now in Treaty.
“Why don’t you like it here?” Wanita asked, rubbing her tears off on my shoulder.
“I like it, honey. It’s just all so different.”
“Different from what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You and Reggie, Alacrity and Bones. I can’t keep up with it all. Sometimes I just want to go home.”
“Don’t leave us, Chance,” the little girl said.
“Chance,” someone else called from a distance away.
I looked up because it was not a voice that I knew. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite tell from where or when.
“Chance,” she called again.
Across from Number Twelve, out of the trees, came Juan Thrombone accompanied by a tall woman. She had short-cropped blond hair and fair skin. As they approached, I could see that she had a nasty-looking scar down her jawline. She wore only a fur cape that didn’t cover all of her body at once. She was calling my name and waving at me.
“Alacrity” issued from my lips.
The next thing I knew, I was running. Addy and Reggie and Wanita were behind me. I was the first to reach her, though. I picked her up and hugged her hard. The squeeze she gave me nearly broke my spine.
She hollered in my ear and threw me around.
“Hi, everybody!” s
he yelled.
We all cheered and capered, a lost tribe of primitives secreted beyond the reach of sanity.
“Bones made me fight with the bears,” Alacrity said as we sat around the fire that night. Clothed only in her bearskin robe, she sat at my side, holding my arms, lacing her fingers with mine. A dark circle of dried food was etched around her full lips. “First it was just a little one. We wrestled for a hour almost, but then I pulled her ears so hard that she ran away. I wouldn’t have done that, but she clawed me on my jaw and that made me mad.”
Juan Thrombone was snoring under Number One while the rest of us sat around the fire under Twelve.
“But then,” Alacrity continued, “after I would fight, I’d get real tired and have to go to sleep. And all the bears were growling. And when I’d wake up there’d be another bear, only a little bigger, and then I’d fight again. But every time I was stronger and knew how to fight better. Sometimes I’d get a broken leg. Sometimes I’d get cut real bad. But the only scar was from the first time. Bones said it was first blood, and he put special dirt in it while I was asleep so it wouldn’t go away. He said that I should always remember first blood because I was a warrior, and warriors had to remember that they could be hurt too.
“Finally I had to fight Brutus.”
“Who’s that?” Wanita cried.
“Brutus was that big black bear that chased us here. He always hated me because I broke his nose. He’s always been waiting around here to get me, only Bones wouldn’t let him until we had the contest. ’Cause, you see, Bones said that I had to grow in order to feel my power. He said that I was always so restless because I needed to be big to do what I need to do. And so after each time I’d sleep, I got bigger. And when I was all grown up, I had to have a fight to the death with Brutus because that would be my bap … bap …”
“Baptism,” Addy said.
“Yeah,” Alacrity agreed. “Baptism.”
“Uh-huh.” Wanita nodded and looked into her friend’s eyes. “That’s ’cause you gotta be fightin’ an’ stuff. I seen that. I seen it, Alacrity. You were beautiful and real mad.”
“He came at me real fast,” Alacrity said. “But I jumped high and landed on his back. Then I pulled his ears and jumped off when he tried to crush me on a tree. And then I got me a stick and he kept comin’, but I’d keep jumpin’ outta the way and hittin’ ’im on the neck and stuff. One time he caught me and pushed me down with his paws and he cut my chest, but I rolled away when he got offa me for a second. And then I hit him across the face and he couldn’t see nuthin’. And so then I hit him on the head with a rock and he fell down and rolled around ’cause he couldn’t see and his head hurt.” Alacrity stopped for a moment then and looked very serious.
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